Ever since Emma Donoghue, inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, impressed and horrified in equal measure with Room, there has been a slowly growing trend for thrillers about abducted children. Maggie Mitchell’s debut, Pretty Is, joins a phalanx of fellow kidnap-lit novels out in recent months – The Girl in the Red Coat, How I Lost You, The Boy That Never Was – but stands out for its slick, subversive take on a trope that is showing no signs of going away.
Lois and Carly May, spelling bee champion and beauty pageant queen, are 12 when they are abducted by a man they come to know as Zed. He keeps them in a cabin in the middle of the woods for six weeks before their ordeal comes to an end, providing them with ample copies of old Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie novels – and, more darkly, Robert Browning’s effortlessly sinister poem Porphyria’s Lover - with which to while away the time, muttering darkly about the corrupt nature of women.
Nearly two decades later, the girls haven’t seen each other for years. Lois is a professor teaching 18th-century literature, and attempting to keep quiet her sideline as the author of a popular thriller that details her own experiences. She’s not having much success – a creepy student has discovered the details of her past, and won’t leave her alone. Carly May now goes by the name of Chloe, an actor who has never really made it, her scripts usually ending with her early death: “It turned out people liked to watch me die.” She has also been approached to play the role of the female detective in the film adaptation of Lois’s novel Deep in the Woods, “a sort of chick-lit/thriller hybrid of the more literary variety”.
The story moves between the first-person perspectives of Lois and Chloe, and an extract from Lois’s novel, slowly spilling out, in the process, the details of their kidnapping and what happened in the cabin. Just why, we wonder, did the girls climb willingly into Zed’s car? What was he planning to do with them? What did he do to them? Do they even remember? “I am afraid,” Lois says after dreaming about her imprisonment. “My dreams have always insisted upon the fear I don’t remember feeling at the time.”
Mitchell also unspools the lonely realities of their current lives: Chloe beautiful but isolated, Lois spending most of her time with her stalker, Sean, who is desperate for the inside track on her abduction. Disturbed and frightened about his intentions, she nonetheless meets him repeatedly, inventing salacious stories for him about what happened to her, as he starts to become synonymous in her mind with the invented villain at the heart of the sequel to Deep in the Woods that she is meant to be writing.
She might eruditely discuss theories about fiction – “You’re thinking of Henry Fielding’s argument that fiction should adhere to a standard of probability, rather than possibility” – but her state of mind is increasingly called into question. “This isn’t Pamela, with its stupid happy ending,” she is told.
There are layers upon layers upon layers in Pretty Is, with Lois’s novelised version of the abduction overlapping with the memories of the women themselves, the stories Lois is telling Sean, and the increasing sense of danger as events converge on the film set of the adaptation. Like those who repeatedly question Lois and Chloe about their experiences, we are desperate for a motive, desperate to make sense of what happened.
“It occurs to me suddenly that movie logic is usually backward: they make the villain a maniac because he has to be a maniac in order to commit whatever the crime is, because without the crime there wouldn’t be any fucking story... The crime comes first; the motive is an afterthought. But in real life, obviously, the motive has to come first,” Chloe muses. Mitchell teases and dances, always one step ahead, never happier than when she’s refusing to pin anything down.
Pretty Is is published by Orion, £12.99. To buy for £10.39 click here
